I’m not enjoying this writing to a deadline malarkey; it’s giving me more anxiety than last season’s penalty shoot-out against Everton!
I’m sitting here staring at the flashing cursor on a blank page trying to decide what to write about, with an equally blank mind. Although I said I was going to focus on the social and cultural side of things I know that in reality the majority of you just want to read and talk about what happens on the pitch. In fact, following my column last week, I was chatting with our very own Longtimelurker and he said that he was a little disappointed by my decision to not cover ‘on the pitch’ issues and that he hoped and expected that I would revisit that. The truth is that I just don’t have any confidence in my ability to analyse the game. I love watching it and I know what I like but I know that I don’t see the patterns on the field that my husband sees for example. Despite the fact that I can actually control a football and have demonstrated a decent level of skill, I just know that if I was playing alongside him that he would be screaming at me to pass and move and berating me for not finding space. It frustrates the hell out of me that I can’t be more analytical but I still enjoy watching it in my own way. As the Lurker said, he’s firmly in the ‘I don’t know much about art but I know what I like’ school of Philistinism and he asked how many of us would be honest enough to say the same about football?
This got me thinking. Is my inability to read the game like the other ‘experts’ (ahem) on WHTID because I’ve never played proper 11-a-side myself or do I simply not have a football brain? I think not having anyone to watch games with and to explain the tactics to me when I was small is certainly a factor. Maybe if I’d had more input at an age when my brain was busy making all its neural connections and synapses it would be more football shaped. Then again maybe a football brain is an inherent thing that you’re born with and not something that can be learned? I decided to investigate.
Many legendary football players have been hailed for their ability to ‘read the game’, showing an uncanny genius for being able to predict where the ball will be as play unfolds. Our own Bobby Moore and Trevor Brooking are regularly cited as prime examples. The best players see things earlier than everyone else. They react faster, they see passes and spaces and they can process everything more quickly than players who don’t have their gift. They instinctively know where their team-mates are … what foot an opponent has his weight on … where the goal keeper is … how much weight to put on a pass so it arrives in the strikers path.
Then there are others who have made it into high level professional football based on their ball control and/or pace but seem to have little capacity to apply their intellect as well as their physical dexterity to the game.
A high profile example of just such a player is Theo Walcott. In 2010 Chris Waddle publicly questioned Walcott’s England credentials and claimed that the Arsenal winger "doesn’t understand the game.” Speaking on Radio Five Live Waddle said:
“People keep saying he’s young but Wayne Rooney understood the game at 16, 17. I’ve never seen any difference in Theo Walcott since he was at Southampton and broke into the team at a very young age.
“I’ve never seen him develop. He just doesn’t understand the game for me – where to be running, when to run inside a full-back, when to just play a one-two.
“It’s all off the cuff. The ball comes to him and if he gets a good first touch he might be on his way if he shows pace. But he has a plan in his mind before the ball comes to him.
“He’s not looking as if to think, ‘This is where I want to be, this is where I want to go, and this is what I’m going to do.’
“People keep saying to me, ‘Oh he’s young and he’ll learn.’
“I keep thinking, ‘Fabregas has learnt and he’s young, Rooney has learnt … they all read the game so well.’
“I just don’t think he’s got a football brain and he’s going to have problems.
“Eventually he could play up front but would he know where to run? Let’s be honest, good defenders would catch him offside every time.
“I just don’t know whether he studies the game, learns the game, or what. He’s at a great club where they play fantastic football week-in, week-out, and I’m just surprised he’s never developed his game.”
Waddle’s assessment was backed up by former England boss Graham Taylor, who said:
“I’m not going to be in any disagreement at all. I haven’t seen the improvement of Theo Walcott in terms of what Chris is saying of reading the game. I just haven’t seen it. I just see a problem there.”
Waddle’s and Taylor’s misgivings were echoed by Alan Hansen in his column in The Telegraph when he said:
“With the pace and trickery he possesses in abundance, Walcott will always make a living from the game, but the big unknown is whether he has enough to make it right to the top and be remembered in 20 years’ time as a great player.
“It is no slight on a player to accuse them of not having a football brain. You either have one or you don’t.
“It is about natural instinct, the innate ability to see things before they happen. Wayne Rooney has it and Kenny Dalglish had it.
“When Bob Paisley used to say at Liverpool that, at the highest level, the first two yards were in the head, he was spot-on.
“If Theo Walcott had that ability to see the picture opening up, that football brain, he would be a world-beater, but he has a long way to go and we still don’t know how he will ultimately turn out.
“It is about seeing options, seeing them early and then being able to pick out the right pass at the right time. If he improves all those areas, he can be a 9 out of 10 player. At the moment, he is 7 out of 10.
“But it is not as simple as going out on the training pitch and practising every day. It is about instinct. There is no thought process when you have a football brain, you just see it and play it, so that’s why it is so difficult to add that to your game if you don’t have that natural instinct.”
Fast forward five years and despite his doubters and detractors Walcott has continued to compete at the top level and has just been rewarded with a lucrative new contract at Arsenal. He was also selected over Giroud to start up front in this weekend’s Community Shield; the second time that Arsene Wenger has pulled him in from the flanks to give him the centre-forward position at Wembley ahead of his French striker. At the end of last season the England international started in the FA Cup final against Aston Villa, scoring the opening goal in a 4-0 victory.
So has Walcott gone on to develop a football brain in the interim period and has his reading of the game improved? Reports on Sunday’s game suggest that it was still his pace rather than his footballing acuity which earned him his place, as he used his speed to pull Chelsea’s defenders into awkward positions. His only really meaningful contribution to the game was his well-timed pass to Oxlade-Chamberlain which led to the game’s only goal. Other commentators suggested that his appointment was a decision based on stats and I couldn’t help but smile at the irony when Wenger’s choice of Walcott over Giroud was described as a ‘no-brainer’.
When he was asked after the game whether Theo Walcott will keep that role during the new season, Wenger said:
“It depends on the games. I tried to see the options I have through the season.
“I felt today that I wanted to use Theo’s pace to go in behind. In the first half he worked very hard, didn’t get too much service, but he worked very hard.”
So it shows that you don’t necessarily need an innate ability to see the patterns in football to succeed as a professional but what could Walcott do to take his game to the next level and to be hailed for his comprehension as much as his blistering pace? Is it possible to acquire a football brain through the right kind of training?
A decade ago in an article in Nature: The International Weekly Journal of Science Paul Ward, a psychologist at Florida State University, stated:
“Coaches haven’t quite caught on to the power of the mind, instead focusing on visual skills such as seeing a ball in peripheral vision. People try to train players’ eyes as opposed to their brains."
Ward believed then that ‘reading the game’ is not just a turn of phrase, top players’ brains really do work differently to those of the rest of us.
At the time it was common for progressive coaches to subject players to intense spatial-awareness tasks in an effort to hone their visual skills. However, Ward said that they might be better off getting players to focus on mental rather than visual improvement. Sports psychologists would test players’ reactions to the ball and eye movements using virtual-reality systems or giant video screens hooked up to joysticks. Ward claims that such studies suggest that visual skills account for only a small fraction of the difference between expert football players and novices.
He posited that elite players have "enhanced perceptual cognitive skills.” In footballing terms, they ‘read the game’ well. He went on to expound that these star players use the same amount of their brain for these tasks as a novice; but they use it better, for instance by perceiving the field as a unit or by looking at key body parts to anticipate an opponent’s moves. So much of what we recognize as footballing talent is down to the brain rather than the body.
Ward argued that perceptual cognitive skills can keep a player in the game as he ages and loses speed; and he cited Paolo Maldini as a perfect example. Maldini is widely regarded as one of the greatest defenders of all time. He played at a world class level for his entire career spanning two and a half decades, and won the Best Defender trophy at the UEFA Club Football Awards at the age of 39, as well as the Serie A Defender of the Year Award in 2004 at the age of 36.
At the time Ward admitted that some vision experts would disagree with him and say that visual perception is crucial to the sport. While coaches at the highest levels were persisting in hiring visual specialists, psychologists such as Ward were suggesting another approach. He had found that players can improve with the help of simulations that boost perceptual cognitive skills associated with the game.
Ten years on it seems that ‘brain training’ may still not be common practice among leading football coaches as scientists at London’s Brunel University are still working on the theory that the game’s elite players, such as Barcelona’s Lionel Messi and Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo, have mental faculties that are better programmed to anticipate their opponents’ moves. Research published in the Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology in 2013 found that of 39 players tested, the more experienced footballers were able to suppress the urge to act instinctively, making them less susceptible to feints or tricks from their opponents.
Brunel’s study reinforces the view held by one of the greatest players of all time, Johan Cruyff, who said:
“Football is a game you play with your brain.”
Ward was clearly a man ahead of his time as the question of whether football clubs are missing a trick in overlooking dedicated training for the most important organ of all – the brain – is still being asked. Today’s football professionals have a battery of physios, fitness trainers and doctors all striving to fine-tune their players’ physique for optimum performance but I wonder how many of them are focused on ‘brain training’ and have added a neuroscientist to their backroom staff?
When he spoke to CNN in 2013, Dr Dan Bishop from Brunel’s Centre for Sports Medicine and Human Performance said:
“I can see top teams employing neuroscientists in the future. That’s because we have the skills and resources to witness very subtle changes in perceptual abilities that may not initially manifest in performance data, because people can change their mind midway through a task and therefore give an erroneous response, when in fact their initial ‘preattentive’ brain response was the correct one. I imagine that this will be most useful at academy level, to assess the development of young players.”
Bishop believes the findings could help nurture a new generation of young sports stars in Britain. He said:
“We believe this greater level of neural activity is something that can be developed through high-quality training, so the next step will be to look at how the brain can be trained over time to anticipate the moves of opponents.”
During the trial, players ranging from novices to semi-professionals were placed in an MRI scanner and shown video clips of a player dribbling towards them. They then had to decide in which direction to move in order to tackle them. The study found the better players were more sensitive to moves and tricks by an opponent than those at the less talented end of the scale, which came as no surprise to Bishop when he said:
“I am confident the findings would be even stronger with professional players. Much of the activation we saw was comparable to the activations we had witnessed in our previous studies of badminton players — which included a large number of international athletes.”
There is a growing group of coaches who need no convincing of the power of the brain in developing top players. One of them is Kevin McGreskin, Technical Director at Soccer eyeQ, a company that specialises in elite performance coaching.
During an interview with football magazine The Blizzard McGreskin said:
“I think that coaches either forget, or don’t even realise, that football is a hugely cognitive sport. We’ve got to develop the players’ brains as well as their bodies but it’s much easier to see and measure the differences we make to a player’s physiology than we can with their cognitive attributes.”
Soccer eyeQ’s website explains how these studies are consistently showing that it is the mental abilities, not necessarily the physical prowess, that is the differentiating factor between elite and non-elite players; and that a holistic approach is required which gives the same attention to developing mental abilities as well as physical.
McGreskin’s views are shared by Michel Bruyninckx, formerly Academy Director for Belgian club Standard Liege and Qatar’s Aspire Academy, who is something of a pioneer when it comes to brain training in football players. He places huge value on “brain-centered learning” and devised a specific program designed to foster improvement in a young player’s cognitive skills. Bruyninckx places the same level of importance of neuroscience as he does football tactics.
Both Bruyninckx and McGreskin have embraced “overload” drills to help tune players’ brains. Some might be asked to speak in different languages during fitness training, while others are asked to throw a tennis ball around and call out colours during sessions involving a football.
Bruyninckx told The Blizzard:
“We need to develop an engram – a neurological track – in the brain. We always thought that sporting activities were mechanical activities, but we know that there are interventions from the brain. Jose Mourinho immediately understood what I’m trying to do and he asked a lot of intelligent questions. He also noticed that the organisation of the drills requires a greater team involvement, more concentration, attention, a continuous inciting of perception and that intelligent playing could grow a lot.”
Bruyninckx’s brain training method, which he has developed in collaboration with the University of Louvain, is called CogiTraining and its key tool is SenseBall. According to Bruyninckx, the method’s objective is to generate intelligent players who can think and play faster and more accurately in a collective approach. In 2014 AC Milan adopted the CogiTraining/SenseBall system in order to emphasise brain centered education as part of its core training method for young players.
Presented with all this research and information, do you believe that a football brain can be created with cognitive training or do you think that it will always be something a player either just has or doesn’t have?
If it is a valid hypothesis, why is the game only now waking up to the importance of cognitive training, 50 years after England was lead to victory by arguably one of the greatest ‘football brains’ we’ve ever seen? Is it only something worth doing with academy players or can mature professionals also benefit from this approach?
Finally, which West Ham players, past and present, do you think had/have an innate ability to read the game much more effectively than their team mates?
Personally, I was particularly interested in Bruyninckx’s concept of overload drills and wondered whether we are inadvertently giving other countries an advantage over the England side by employing so many foreign players in the Premier League? Are their cognitive skills, and ergo their game, being improved simply by training in a foreign language? Would England’s fortunes improve if more of our players plied their trade overseas? It’s all food for thought.